Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communication and, more particularly, to a method of user equipment performing cell selection in a wireless communication system and user equipment using the method.
Related Art
A wireless communication system divides its coverage into a plurality of cells and provides communication service in order to overcome the limitations of the coverage and the limited accommodation capacity of users.
A cell search and selection (hereinafter abbreviated as ‘cell selection’) process is a process in which user equipment searches for a cell (or base station) from which service will be received and selecting a retrieved cell. An object of cell selection is to register the user equipment with a network in order to receive service from the base station.
A conventional cell selection process is to search for a cell having the strongest reception signal strength, of all frequency bands that may be searched for by user equipment, through a signal strength measurement process. For example, user equipment may search for a cell having the strongest signal feature value based on Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) or a Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and select a cell to be accessed by checking whether or not the cell is the network of an operator to which the user equipment belongs.
The type and characteristics of service traffic and applications which can be used over a wireless network become diverse.
Accordingly, the wireless data use pattern of user equipment also becomes diverse. For example, user equipment which uses a large amount of data and user equipment which use a small amount of data may be simultaneously present in the same network. Furthermore, a data pattern used by the same user equipment may vary depending on the place and current speed.
If user equipment has a different data use pattern, a network may preferably provide the user equipment with service suitable for the data use pattern of the user equipment. In this case, a network can be efficiently managed, and the user equipment can also be provided with desired service.
However, a conventional cell selection process has an efficient problem because a cell is selected on the basis of only the strength of a received signal by not taking a data use pattern of user equipment into consideration.
Furthermore, there have been proposed methods using different cell access depending on the speed of user equipment. However, the methods are problematic in that it is difficult to clearly measure the speed of user equipment and a data use pattern is not taken into consideration.